I mentioned the hydrangea photographs I took with the presumably now passé iPhone app Hipstamatic , perhaps you'd like to see one (here below). I chose hydrangeas...well, if I think about it, I must paraphrase Paul Strand: they chose me. It was late summer and they were...there...behind every garden fence on my bus stop walk.

In true human style - who was it who said that human beings were 'meaning-making machines'? - I began to link these flowers with the thoughts I was beginning to arrange in my heart, mind and head towards what came to be my show 'Chastity Belt'. What is it as a woman to grow older?

Part of it means looking at appearance-as-value. I had to come to terms with my own thinking. How can it be that fairy tales and nursery rhymes grip the psyche so tightly and for such duration? '...and what is your fortune, my pretty young maid? My face is my fortune, Sir, she said' got me up a good many cul de sacs on my path through life. Not that I thought my face was my fortune, rather I feared it wasn't the kind of face that would have a good 'fortune' - and that bled into more questions than just love-life. Tedious stuff this sort of reflection, I know, but part of the fabric of life and as such must be worn or torn or dealt with in one manner or other, especially if one is intent on making some creative work out of it.

I have found sidestepping a useful tactic in creativity (Process-worker Arnold Mindell would call it changing modality, I guess). I attempted a poem about hydrangeas: ' frowsy / blowsy / nodding-head drowsy / old maid’s blouse-y' I wrote. I associated hydrangeas with dull suburban sprawl of my childhood, and a conservative dull-mindedness. Yet each of the flowers insisted in yielding up some kind of beauty. Was I being taught some kind of lesson?

Author

Performer and theatremaker Peta Lily has been taking photographs for the last five years. Her aesthetic has been to use her iPhone camera to capture the world close up and with an immediacy that is both surprising and moving.